Zed Shaw, LPTHW, & Learn You An Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Zed Shaw, LPTHW, & Learn You An Ruby

krainboltgreene.github.com

Heavily considering the name change: Learn You The Ruby For Awesome Power.

EDIT: Ok, slowly moving over. Time to rewrite history! Future GooglAzon.com users will be like "What Ye Mystery Doth This?! YouErEls point to Learn You An Ruby, but Thine Project Was Called-eth Learn You The Ruby!" And no one will ever understand why, because Hacker News will be like Slashdot and no one will visit it except to make ironic references to "hacker newsing a site", because MyFacespora Newsddit will be where all the cool startup guys hang out.

For some reason that "An" irks me way more than it should.

In a related matter, I smiled when I saw this: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-an-ruby-for-awe...

Trust me, I feel like that much more of a dweeb when I tell people out loud.

"I'm writing a book, Learn You...(whisper)an ruby(whisper)...For awesome Power"

Well I dare say why not keep going with the trend and have it something like Learn you the Ruby for great good! (At least that hurts a bit less :))

Oh man! Shucks. "The" would have been so much better :/

I need an INTERNET search and replace.

Just change it now, the internet will catch up. The sooner you do it, the better. Obviously only do it if you really want to change the title.

(FWIW I don't really like the "an" either, sorry!)

The unclosed parenthesis is irking me more, he opened it in paragraph 2 and never closes it!

The "Learn You A Haskell" link that points to a page for Learn You Some Erlang is what got me. (though I don't mean to make this a thread for criticizing the author)

Ack, both fixed.

Actually, that's a lie. They aren't errors. Bonus500 once spurned my love so I secretly redirect users to Learn You Some Erlang, instead of Learn You A Haskell. :(

why is there an "An"?

It's kinda explained here: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-an-ruby-for-awe...

That's a 404 now.

Yeah, the issue got closed. Github should really fix that.

The entire repo was deleted.

Oops, right. No I just renamed it: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-the-ruby-for-aw...

I like how why's (poignant) guide to Ruby kicked off the trend for quirky programming language books, and now we're back to writing quirky programming language books for Ruby. (Though the poignant guide may have been a little too quirky.)

There have been whimsical book covers before but it does seem like a quirky Renaissance.

Didn't care for Mr Bunny?

Did Mr. Bunny ever appear in anything but his guide to ActiveX? I can understand why someone might not have heard of ActiveX.

Anyone old enough to grow up in the era of early PCs remembers quirky programming books. I learned Pascal from the Sherlock Holmes-themed Pascal book back in the day. Though, admittedly, Mr. Bunny and the cartoon foxes are an order of magnitude quirkier.

Mr. Bunny also appeared in Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java, which featured a full-page image of a semicolon, one of the more important characters used in Java code.

I don't think why intended the book to be quirky so much as that was just his personality (or the character he was portraying).

Writing a book and allowing your personality to come through is more interesting than making it quirky because it's fashionable to be quirky.

Just wanted to pipe in and say that as Martin's former boss (before he went to Engine Yard) I think this whole Internet firestorm is hilarious. I always knew he'd make me proud :)

The Learn You A Haskell, and Learn You Some Erlang links both point to Learn You Some Erlang. Some folks may become confused. :)

I see no problem there.

It's been fixed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1877829

Was just a failed attempt at humour.

As a writer AND a programmer, I applaud the creativity people are bringing to writing about Language. And I mean language in the programming sense. Ruby is obviously exciting many people out there and it's great to see the creativity didn't stop with _why's book. Perhaps it's just beginning.

Quick question about Learn You A * books -- has anyone here ever started from 0, read one, and then started writing useful software?

LYAH really helped cement some of my Haskell knowledge; I'm at that middle sort of zone where I knew basic stuff, but some of the more advanced things don't make sense to me yet. The Applicative, Monad, and Zippers parts in particular have helped me a lot.

What sorts of programming problems have you solved with Applicative, Monad, and Zippers so far?

I'm not actually doing anything useful with Haskell. It's purely an intellectual plaything with me.

That said, I've used Applicative when playing around with parsing, and Monads... all the time. Though mostly just IO, Maybe, Writer, and State, nothing crazy.

I'm still getting comfortable with Zippers, so I have yet to even toy around with them. But the LYAH description was much easier than any of the other (small amounts) of reading I've done on the subject.

Yes - I had no ruby experience, read why's ruby book, and started writing business intelligence rails apps inside a big media company. Funny now, looking back on it. FWIW i work with c# now, could never find another ruby job that paid well...

> First, this assumes you've got a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 (But any version around that should work).

Do we really need to be so specific to learn ruby ?

Getting Ruby up and running is different for every major OS out there.

Quite frankly I don't have the resources to document how to do it on the Mac.

Windows is...well I don't know, just a few months ago it was almost non-existent, now I hear it's not to bad?

these "Learn You..." (NB: this does not include LPTHW) books seem like a post-modern version of the "For Dummies" series. So, if you enjoyed the vapid "For Dummies"-style jokes but wanted more non-sequiturs, these are the books for you.

I am currently writing Learn You Some Erlang. I have never read one of the 'For Dummies' book, have no idea what tone they employ or what kind of readers they assume they have.

I can say, however, that there already exist a few books on Erlang, quite serious, that actually cost money. I wanted to offer a free resource to learn Erlang, given my frustration at the lack such things when I began learning the language myself. I found a problem, and am currently trying my best to solve it.

If you feel like learning the language but my book's style and/or tone annoys you, you might prefer buying one of the books. There's also an online tutorial on erlang.org and an interactive one on tryerlang.org.

Your book is amazing. I've been trying to learn erlang, and you were the first person I've come across who really explains things well. I just wanted to thank you, and encourage you to keep on writing.

A link, for anybody who's curious:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content

YMMV of course but, in my experience these light-hearted free books are better than the For Dummies books, which are also for-profit, and tend to feel factory-churned. That being said, I've only skimmed one or two, and that was in high school. I feel like there is a difference in spirit and motivation which sets them apart.

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